The Science of Web Art, Design and Development

There has been much discussion lately about twitter, how to use it and heavy criticism, so I’d share my view on twitter and tell you how I use mine.

The year of 1997 was the one I took the deep plunge on the internet and, among other things I started to use the IRC chat system heavily.

One of my favorite places was the #photoshop channel on Undernet, where Photoshop techniques and design in general were discussed all day long. I usually got there first thing in the morning and kept logged until I went back home, and checked it and participated every now and then during the day.

(Maybe IRC is too old-school for many poeple - so a quick explanation would be that is more or less like what was known like chat rooms, but wasn’t normally performed on the web, you’d use a specific client instead. Details on Wikipedia)

What did I got from it? I had the chance to:

• Ask experts and learned a lot, since I was a newbie
• Explain things that I had already mastered to newbies
• Be exposed to the work of experts
• Show my work and have opinions on it
• Just talk to nice people

That was the base for my first personal site on that very year which was, as expected, a gallery of images and tutorials on Photoshop ;)

By that time chat rooms mushroomed all around and most people I heard were using them to chat with girls or guys and learning how to transform that into friendship/sex/engagement/whatever.

That might be also a nice purpose on itself, if you come to think of it, and some got what they wanted, but most of these people were just wasting their time at large, IMO.

How about Twitter?

Times have changed, and today, if we were to use IRC like I did back then you’d be participating in a thousand IRC channels and will be impossible to follow.

Personally, I see twitter more or less like a chat room aggregator where every user is a chatroom and your time line is your reader.

In twitter you can,

• Ask experts and learn a lot
• Explain things you have already mastered
• Be exposer to good material through links
• Show your work and get exposed
• Just talk to nice people

And because IRC worked so well for me back then, I pretty much have the same position about it.

Again, this is not how I think Twitter should be used, this is just how I use it.

Twitter can also make you waste a lot of time as much as it allows you to build campaigns for strategic growth of your site and many other things, Just like IRC and Chat rooms before. I think what you get largely depends on you alone, who do you follow and what do you share.

The so called Web 2.0 is the medium where readers are also writers or, in a more general sense, consumers are also producers. Every single comment you leave on a blog is content you produce and use to expose yourself while, hopefully, contributing to the whole online community one crumb at a time.

While probloggers build monetization and authority strategies for blogs and internet media sites, millions of other people just share their pictures in social sites like flickr, videos on youtube and so on.

The curious thing is that, to a certain measure, people are more interested in spontaneity than production. The fact that most people on the internet have access to rather advanced technology, makes it less interesting to see the technology by itself and more interesting to focus on each one’s perspective and enables people to use the technology to share those unique skills and ideas each one has.

Michael Martine would go as far as to say:

Over-analyzing before you begin is the best way to kill something before it even has a chance. Just go for it.

But of course you can’t do anything if you can’t handle this technology, so here is a quick guide of interesting stuff around the web, either if you want to be a web video entrepreneur or if you just want to share videos with your friends

read full post…

I am starting to worry about Google an the democratic way of the web.

Google always claimed that their algorithm was to reflect the true democratic nature of the web, through linkbacks, but these days they have power enough to just dictate what they want,

A client called me this week seeking advice because Google has sent them a mail (yes, I know, amazing, google sent them an email) telling them that they were blacklisted for at least 30 days because they had put too many keywords on the pages of their company’s website.

read full post…

Since I published the Zo’C powerblogroll plugin, I have received a lot of feedback from users who’d like to use the plugin but they are discouraged by the fact that you need to deal with PHP code, even if it is in a very small amount.

I’m willing to release a new, much more user friendly, version. But while this doesn’t happen, I’ve recorded two videos showing how to install and configure the plugin.

In the video, I use the One Click Install plugin that is a great one and I strongly recommend. If you don’t want to use it, however, you’ll have to use the normal FTP method as with any other plugin.

Installing, activating, and using the plugin from your theme

(video will open in a new window)

Adding links to Wordpress

In case you don’t know how to fill all the information that your Powerbloroll can display (such as the favicon, description, notes, RSS, etc.) this video shows you how to do it.

(video will open in a new window)

Like many people, it’s been quite a while that I hear about podcasts, but haven’t really been catching up on this technology, but some weeks ago, I suddently became interested on this technology and subscribed to a couple of them.

While some turned out really boring and unsibscribed soon, others got me thinking:

If I had this kind of technology when I was a geek teen, I’d be delighted! Finding resources for my crazy projects would have been so much easier.

And then a question popped into my mind, just as there are great podcasts out there and, further, it is a wonderful technology whose full use still have to be show, there is a lot of garbage out there and that could not be a good thing for children.

read full post…

Picture by Chris Bevan(cc)

Consider this:

How lost is a visitor that come to your 404 and how lost is a visitor that comes to your home page?

Home pages are not what they used to be. Unless you are a big site, people don’t go to your index page and try to find something on it.

Say I’m looking for Strawberry Jam. I know lots and lots of sites about food, but I won’t look strawberry jam in any of them, I’ll go to mother google and ask.

read full post…

If you haven’t heard about Django, it is a Python Based framework to build complex and resource savvy sites easily and quickly. I have been studying and playing with Django in the last days and I’m simply amazed about it.

If you are a designer rather than a developer, the word python might scare you a little, since you don’t want to learn any python at all. Instead, if you are a developer, you might be skeptic to read that complex sites can be built easily.

read full post…

When I started working on the web, ten years ago, sites should be done to be visible with a resolution of 640×480px, otherwise a good part of visitors would be blocked out. As resolutions increased the minimum size increased to 800×600 and today it is believed that designing towards 1024×768 is safe.

Will this number increase in the future? Should we still concern about low resolutions? What is The ultimate answer to screen resolutions for web design?

I really don’t think the ultimate answer for screen resolutions is a number, no matter what the number is. I think the answer is a process by which websites are developed.

read full post…

Some time ago I was looking for a plugin that showed both favicon and name on a Wordpress blogroll. As I couldn’t find it, I had to made my own, but the code wasn’t general enough to distribute it.

Recently I have created a powerful blogroll, in the form of a page template, capable to display the name, favicon, description, notes and even the RSS link of blogs in your blogroll, because blogrolls with just a list of links are not useful anymore.

Now I have packaged it as a plugin for your delight: The ZoC Powerblogroll.

Download it right away, or go to the plugin page.

Download It

(Comments are disabled on this page, you can discuss this on the plugin page.)

This plugin has been downloaded 3121 times.

I have just published Zo’C Subcats, a wordpress plugin that enables you to display either a list or a drop down menu with the subcategories of a category of your choice. The plugin gracefully degrades in absence of Javascript.

You can read further instructions and download it on the plugin page or you can download it immediately here.

The plugin started humbly to address a need of my fellow blogger Desty, and was published thanks to the incentive of Michael and Jen.

Any feedback is welcome :-)

Enjoy!

(Comments are disabled on this page, you can discuss this on the plugin page.)

This plugin has been downloaded 311 times.